Not too long ago, we hosted our second annual WordPress.com Development Summit and welcomed over 1,300 attendees on the occasion. The summit was absolutely on-line, and it constructed on the momentum of our inaugural Development Summit in 2020 after listening to from you, our group, that one other convention could be a terrific studying and networking alternative for folks trying to develop their WordPress.com websites. Based mostly on the optimistic suggestions from final yr, this yr’s programming continued to be customer-focused by highlighting folks — identical to you! — who began websites and companies on WordPress.com and have seen them flourish.
We additionally modified up the tech stack we used, which allowed us to supply a greater person expertise and to enhance the method of promoting tickets and, later, entry to recorded movies from the occasion. In the event you get pleasure from constructing websites with WordPress, tinkering round with design and performance, I’m happy to share a behind-the-scenes take a look at how we bought our Development Summit website to work for us. This clarification may be particularly useful should you’re making an attempt to promote registrations in your website and/or limit entry to content material behind a paywall.
Promoting Tickets
At WordPress.com, we love to make use of plugins when constructing websites, and putting in a variety of them on the Development Summit website made ticket gross sales a breeze for patrons.
- First, we put in the WooCommerce plugin on our WordPress.com website and created a ticket as a easy product within the retailer catalog. Nothing fancy, only a title and a worth. From a design perspective, we decided that it wasn’t ideally suited to have potential convention attendees go to the product web page, so we configured the call-to-action button on the homepage to robotically add a ticket to a customer’s cart and ship them straight to the checkout web page.
- Then, utilizing Zapier and its WooCommerce extension, we configured a “zap” that was triggered every time a buyer purchased a ticket, which in flip alerted Hopin — the digital occasion software program platform we selected to host the Development Summit — to create a brand new attendee registration.
- In an effort to simplify the checkout course of, and hopefully improve conversion charges, we used the WooCommerce Checkout Discipline Editor plugin to take away a variety of default fields, resembling billing road tackle, telephone quantity, and order feedback. We have been additionally capable of customise the sphere format in order that it took up much less “real estate” on the checkout web page.
- The MailPoet plugin allowed us to customise the content material of the default WooCommerce emails for accomplished order confirmations. Certain, we might have put in a toddler theme after which used customized templates to place the textual content we wished within the message, however the MailPoet plugin was free for our functions. Plus we are able to use it for e-mail advertising campaigns sooner or later, ought to we select.
On-Demand Video Entry
Main as much as the Development Summit, our focus was on driving attendance to the dwell occasion. As soon as the convention wrapped up, we shifted focus to offering entry to recordings of Development Summit periods for attendees who wished to observe on demand, and for individuals who missed the occasion however wished to expertise it firsthand. With the WooCommerce Memberships extension, we put the movies behind a paywall — in different phrases, you must have a membership to view them. To promote memberships, we’re utilizing the identical WooCommerce product we used to promote tickets. We simply modified its configuration so that purchasing the product provides the client to a membership plan that grants entry to video content material from all of the periods in 2020 and 2021. Moreover, we ensured that anybody who purchased a ticket to the dwell occasion would get a yr of on-demand entry robotically.
Website Design
Aesthetics are as essential as performance. We constructed the Development Summit website with the Twenty Twenty-One theme. The homepage makes use of Gutenberg blocks. Among the frequent blocks are Cowl, Structure Grid, and Columns. We additionally used some customized CSS code to tweak the design to go well with our wants.
That’s just about it. Did you miss the Development Summit? Use the coupon code behindthescenes to get 25% off on-demand entry to all of the video recordings from 2020 and 2021, now via August 2022!